Airmail and the mailroom
A letter that takes a day
Turn on airmail and your letter takes twenty-four hours to land, the way post does. It sounds like an odd thing to build into software until you have used it. Knowing the reply cannot arrive for a day changes what you write: people stop sending three lines and start telling you about their week.
You can switch it on for a single letter, or set it for good so everything you send travels slowly. If either person prefers airmail, the whole conversation travels that way — nobody has to explain themselves.
The mailroom
Every airmail letter currently in the sky is on this map, tracked from take-off to letterbox. It shows routes and nothing else: which countries are writing to each other tonight, how far the post is travelling, when the next one lands. Never who is writing to whom, and never a word of what is in them.
It is the closest thing the site has to a window. On a quiet evening you can watch a letter cross the Indian Ocean and know somebody is about to have a good morning.
Stamps and streaks
Exchange ten letters with someone and you earn their country's stamp for your album — one per country, however many pen pals live there. Keep writing week after week and the conversation builds a streak. Neither does anything except mark the thing you are already doing.
See every stamp there is to collect →
What airmail looks like in a conversation
While a letter is in the air, the conversation marks it as in transit, with the time it will land. The thread stays sealed both ways while it travels, so neither of you can send the next letter until it has arrived. The recipient does not see a word of it early, and the sender cannot hover over it waiting for a reply that cannot come yet.
When it lands, it lands like post: all at once, whole, with the rest of the day's mail. Members often tell us that this is the moment the site reminds them of what they liked about letters as children.
Why slow is the point
Most messaging is built to be fast, and fast writing is mostly short writing. When a reply is going to take a day regardless, there is no reason to rush it, and people write differently: they save things up, they tell a story properly, they answer every question in the last letter instead of the first one. The delay also takes away one of the quiet pressures of online friendship — the sense that you ought to reply straight away, and that the other person can see you have not.
It suits people in very different time zones particularly well. Your letter will land at a sensible hour on their side of the world, and nobody is kept up at night by a conversation.
Video letters travel by airmail too
Verified members can record a video letter of up to a minute, in one take — no retakes and no editing, which is rather the charm of it. Video letters always travel by airmail, so they arrive a day later like a small parcel. Every video letter is reviewed by a moderator.
Reading the mailroom map
Every letter in the mailroom is shown from take-off to landing, like a departures board: where it left, where it is going, and a clock counting down to the moment it lands. Countries, not cities, are the endpoints, and nothing in the mailroom identifies the writer or the reader.
Watching it for a few minutes tells you something the member numbers cannot: which parts of the world are writing to each other at this very moment. It changes with the hour, as evenings move round the planet and each region sits down to write.
Streaks and stamps, a little more
Streaks count weeks, not days, on purpose. A daily streak rewards a quick message sent to keep a number alive, which is exactly the habit a letter site should not encourage. A weekly one simply notices that two people have kept writing, and a streak that breaks costs nothing but the number.
Stamps collect in an album on your profile, one per country. They are easy to explain to a new pen pal and surprisingly satisfying to fill: members who have written to people on several continents tend to be quietly proud of the page.